Secrets of Santorini
Page 36
After the first few lines he looked up, his eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘You mean Bridget got the necklace back, Irini? She really got it back?’ With a sharp intake of breath, he dropped his head into his hands. ‘Holy God! What terrific news!’
‘Listen, Dad, I read in one of her notebooks that the real reason she left us here, a year ago, was to try and trace the necklace. She had to get it back. It wasn’t because she didn’t love us, but because she loved us so much she wanted to put things right.’
He finished reading the article, then stared out of the window for a long time. ‘Where is it now? Is it really in the museum?’
‘I phoned Aaron, but he doesn’t know anything, except that no, it wasn’t given to the museum. He’s just seen the magazine article and wondered if we had found the necklace when we were there for Mam’s funeral. He’s been in a quandary what to do. He’s phoned me a few times but couldn’t get through. I’ve been switched off a lot.’
‘We should go back to Santorini. But you don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, and neither of us have the money . . .’ I could hear the desperation in his voice.
‘Actually, I’ve got a new job.’ I couldn’t hold back a ridiculous grin. ‘My finances are about to change.’
He looked into my face as I told him my news, blinking, amazed, as if he had just recognised somebody he hadn’t seen for a long time. After a pause, he said, ‘You look . . . I don’t know . . .’ He searched for the word I realised I had never heard him use before: ‘Happy!’
His downcast face cleared and shone with pleasure. Like wiping a steamed-up window, everything became obvious to me. I realised that all my life, I had mirrored my parents’ misery, and in turn they had echoed mine. We had all lived in a downward spiral, so concerned about each other’s unhappiness, we hadn’t room for anything but misery. I felt myself on the brink of a new start. There must have been pleasure and joy in our lives before, and it was high time those emotions were brought out, dusted off, and proudly displayed on life’s mantel, for all to see.
I flung my arms around him and gave him such a hug. ‘I’m so excited, Dad!’
His wide smile brightened his face and shone from his eyes. I was reminded of the way my mother described him when he presented her with the dragonfly necklace in the notes I’d read.
I was also slightly shocked and uplifted to feel his happiness reflected mine.
‘I wish your mother was here,’ he said, but not with his usual misery. The delight remained. ‘She’d be so happy for us.’
‘What do you think she was trying to tell us, Dad? After reading the article, I’m sure it was about the necklace: secret, game, remember. I can’t describe my excitement when I made this connection to the Oxo tin. I brought it back with me.’ I paused for a moment. Thinking about my mother and that I would never see her again was still very painful, yet something had changed there too, though I couldn’t quite analyse what that was. ‘You said I used to play noughts and crosses, when I was little. Can you remember anything else?’
‘You loved playing that game, though you had no notion of what it was about. I always pretended you’d won.’
‘After reading the article, I felt sure a clue lay in the Oxo tin, but they were just bits of paper, mementoes, and some plastic rosary beads.’
We sat in silence, me trying not to think about my heap of ironing, the stack of homework books, the woman who wanted to try on my wedding dress this evening, and time ticking by.
‘She liked crosswords,’ my father said, making me jump. ‘Those cryptic ones. I could never fathom them myself. One of the expats would give her his Sunday Express so she could do the puzzles.’
I didn’t see what that had to do with anything. ‘I’ve told Aaron where the spare key is and asked him to search the house. I hope that’s all right with you, Dad?’
‘If I know Bridget, he won’t find the artefacts. He needs to search for a clue. They’ll be hidden, and we should be asking why she hid them? Why didn’t she give them straight to the museum?’
It seemed my father’s illness and old age had fallen away in an instant.
‘Perhaps she didn’t have time. She went on a day-return to Crete the day before the accident. I’m guessing that was the day she got the dragonfly necklace and the jug.’ I took his hand. ‘Imagine how happy she must have been to get them back.’ There it was again, this positive emotion lifting me from the gloom of my mother’s death and Angelo’s betrayal. ‘I’ll bet she was longing to tell us. I can imagine her planning how to break the news once the treasures were safely in the museum. Wouldn’t the museum have been closed by the time the last ferry returned?’
Tommy nodded. ‘Closes at four, I think.’
‘I guess she wrote the article on the ferry, or that evening, and posted it as soon as she could. I feel sure she’s hidden the artefacts, but where?’
‘I’ll bet they’re at the site. Didn’t you say she went straight there the morning of the accident?’
‘Yes. Aaron said she seemed agitated on the phone and wanted him to get back there as soon as he could. She was excited about something.’
Dad looked up to the ceiling and beamed. ‘She would be excited. I’ll bet she was wetting herself.’
His words seemed so out of character I laughed out loud. He turned to me, pulled his chin in, puzzled, then smiled again.
Remember the game, remember the game. The words went around in my head.
‘Perhaps she wasn’t talking about me when she said: “remember the game”. Did she ever play any games herself – patience, bridge? There were a couple of playing cards in the tin.’
He looked at his hands and smiled. ‘We would play pontoon for cents at Christmas, and in the old days, we gathered in the kafenio and played bingo with the other expats, but that was it, really. Bridget loved it, but I’m not a great one for social gatherings.’
I imagined my mother playing bingo and loving it, and Dad itching to get home. The vision made them seem so human, and I was grateful to my father for sharing the event with me.
Mam’s death had drawn my father and I closer together, and I knew that would have pleased her. But the price of this new bonding was too great, and my heart ached with wishes that she was still alive. I pulled myself together and smiled at Dad.
‘Mam phoned Aaron and said she had some important news that morning, but he was trying to get fuel for the generator before the jeep safaris made a queue at the petrol station. He found a tanker filling the pumps and it was almost an hour before he got back. By that time it was too late.’
Dad reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. We sat in silence for a while, contemplating the past and remembering my mother.
*
At the kitchen table, I stared at my wedding dress, hanging from the top of the door. The woman hadn’t turned up, and I had mixed feelings remembering all my pleasure making the gown. I wondered if I would ever marry. If so, I know I would wish in my heart that I had kept the dress.
To imagine walking out of the church into bright sunlight with the man of my dreams made me smile. Then, shocked, I realised it was a vision of Angelo I saw beside me, not Jason, or some yet-to-meet handsome lover. I dismissed the fantasy and concentrated on the Oxo box again.
The rosary beads – could they be a clue? My mother kept her faith right to the end of her life. At her funeral, the priest said she attended mass every Sunday. The bingo ticket made me smile. I could imagine my mother’s fun and my father’s restlessness. Looking closer, I saw the number twenty-one circled in red ink. The playing cards, an ace and a king, didn’t make any sense. I played solitaire on my phone sometimes, but that was it.
The clock over the mantel said six – eight o’clock in Greece. I phoned Aaron.
‘Hi Aaron. It’s Irini. I just wondered if you had a chance to search through my mother’s things?’
‘I’m here now, but no luck so far. I’ll call you the moment I find anything.’
‘Hang on, I’ll have a look on the desk.’ After a moment he said, ‘No, just notes and references to the articles she wrote. Wait . . . there’s a shopping list. Nothing out of the ordinary: bread, soap powder, loo rolls.’ Another pause. ‘Something on the back in red pen . . . Irini, over twenty-one. Does that make any sense?’
‘Not really, though it seems an odd thing to write. Keep looking, Aaron. Please let me know the moment you find anything.’
Irini, over twenty-one? And twenty-one circled on the bingo ticket? From somewhere in the back of my mind, I recalled that a picture card and an ace also scored twenty-one. Oh, Mam! What were you trying to tell me? I grabbed Aaron’s book, raced through the pages, found a map of the site. Each area was numbered, and although they went up to forty-five, there were some numbers missing and twenty-one was among them. I studied the photographs, each one numbered. Fig. 21 was a lidded urn already in the Athens museum, so that could be dismissed.
While ironing clothes for school, the words kept going over in my mind: Irini, over twenty-one. I couldn’t think of any reason for my mother to write that, but felt sure it was relevant. She must have realised she was in danger while the antiquities were in her possession. I returned to the scraps and mementoes in the Oxo tin, even though I had studied them many times over the last few days. Still, nothing made sense.
The mother and father of all headaches descended on me, so I took a couple of aspirin, gave up my investigation, and went to bed.
CHAPTER 39
IRINI
Dublin, present day.
AFTER SCHOOL, I CALLED in on Dad and then rushed to the Raglan Road. At seven-thirty, I found myself polishing glasses behind the bar. Brian and Quinlan were having an argument about whether television or bad education caused the falling theatre attendance. Brian banged his pint down to emphasise a point and slopped beer on the bar top.
‘Would you look at that?’ I said. ‘You’re a mucky devil, Brian.’ I started to wipe up the mess when everything rushed away from me. The next thing I knew, I lay on the floor, a strange numbness about me.
‘Move away! Give her some air,’ Brian shouted as I opened my eyes. Quinlan, Siobhan, and Fergus’s faces retreated from the confined space. They got me into a chair and put a glass of water in my hand.
‘I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps I caught a tummy bug in Greece,’ I said.
‘Are you feckin’ mad?’ Brian said, obviously worried. ‘Coming in here when you’re not well. You could have split your head open on one of those beer crates. Jaysus, Irini, what sort of eejit are you?’
Brian, kindness itself, never swore, and now to hear all this anger directed at me. I searched his eyes for forgiveness as he put his hand on my forehead. In a sickening moment, I remembered the tumour gene.
‘Will I give the doctor a ring, Irini?’ he said.
‘No, Brian, I’m fine . . . It was just a bit of a faint. I’m sorry.’
Brian’s voice softened. ‘Don’t be silly. Drink the water and I’ll run you home in a minute. First thing tomorrow, you’re off to the doctors. You don’t know what you might have picked up, eating all that foreign muck.’ He turned to Siobhan. ‘Watch the bar while I get the car, will you?’
*
In bed, I tossed and turned, fretting about the rogue gene, then stupidly got up and Googled the risks of brain surgery. Bleeding in the brain, blood clot, swelling of the brain, coma (oh God!), also impaired speech, loss of vision, poor coordination and memory problems. Sick with worry, I set off for Doctor Mahoney’s, resigned to the fact I would need brain surgery. The only good thing to come from my mother’s death was that I had been forewarned, and in consequence, would not suffer her fate.
In the small, cluttered surgery, I described my symptoms. He listened patiently while I told him about my mother’s tumour, my car crash and the headaches that followed, and that this was the second time I had fainted in recent weeks. He shone a light in my eyes, listened to my heart and lungs, took my blood pressure, a blood sample, and then asked me to provide a urine sample.
I sat in the waiting room convinced that he would send me for an MRI right away. I needed time to adjust to the situation and my wait was pure agony. Ten minutes later, he called me in to hear his diagnosis. I sat in the chair opposite, chewing my lip.
‘Tell me the worst, Doctor. How serious is it? To be honest, I’m scared to death but I can’t go on worrying. Once I know the facts, I can start making decisions.’
‘Irini, I must tell you, the gene you’re fretting about is so rare, I’m sure you can put it out of your head, so to speak. Also, you don’t appear to be suffering any concussion.’
‘So why do I keep fainting? I’ve never done that before.’
‘In Greece, it was probably a combination of things: heat, stress about your parents, overworked, not enough fluids.’
‘But last night, none of those things applied.’
‘No, that faint was caused by your hormones; perfectly normal when you’re pregnant.’ He smiled.
‘Pregnant?!’ Poleaxed by the word, I stared at him. ‘But I can’t be. It’s not possible.’ Shocked, then angry, I couldn’t believe it. ‘I only . . . just the one night . . . I . . . Oh, God, Doctor, what am I going to do?’
The smile left his face. ‘What do you want to do, Irini?’ He handed me a box of tissues. ‘What about the father? He has a right to know.’
‘No, I can’t tell him.’ I cringed, shame burning my face, even though I had known Doctor Mahoney all my life. ‘You see, he’s married with a child of his own. I didn’t know at the time. They live in Greece. It’s complicated.’
Doctor Mahoney nodded. ‘It’s best if you go home and have a good think, then come back and see me.’
I still couldn’t quite take it in . . . Pregnant!
I left the surgery and walked aimlessly for some time, struggling to get my head around this new development. I sat on the banks of the Liffey, trying to decide what to do. The river, dark and morose on its eternal journey, seemed reluctant to lose itself to the insatiable appetite of the sea, reminding me of my mother and the Goddess of the Marches. It seemed I also had no other way to go.
To sacrifice your child, or to send your little girl away, or to terminate a pregnancy, were all soul-destroying events a woman should not have to experience.
Doctor Mahoney had explained my options and given me leaflets to read. I tried to go through them again but my sore eyes had trouble focusing. One thing he made very clear: it was my body, my decision, and nobody had the right to judge or influence me.
But the thing was, despite everything, I wanted to have Angelo’s baby! Mad as it seemed after such a short time together, I knew I loved him. Oh, how I loved him. But we could never be together. What happiness could come from breaking up a young boy’s family? Later, what would I tell my child? To live a lie would never work, I had learnt that heart-breaking lesson from my mother’s life.
I had no choice but to terminate the pregnancy, and soon. I felt sick and scared at the thought, but I knew I couldn’t pull apart a family, not after my own childhood experience. I returned straight to the surgery to make arrangements, before I changed my mind.
I’d hardly entered the doctor’s waiting room when the heavy oak door opened and Dr Mahoney stuck his head out. ‘Come away in, Irini.’
Sitting in the black plastic chair opposite him, I reached for the tissues, scrubbed the tears from my cheeks, and took a breath. ‘There’s no real choice, Doctor. I may burn in hell, but it’s better than destroying a family because of my recklessness.’
‘Take your time,’ Dr Mahoney said. ‘I can book you into the clinic on Monday evening. You’re less than eight weeks, so it’s early enough for you to have a medical abortion. It’s very simple. A few pills and, in mo
st cases, it’s almost painless. You have some time to think about it, so if you want to talk, just phone me.’ He produced a business card and jotted his number down. ‘This is the clinic’s number, and here’s my home phone. Call me any time if you want to talk it through. I’ll help you all I can.’
*
I walked to Saint Stephen’s Green and watched the children play on the swings. My tears were cried and my decision made; I simply needed a little time to harden myself before I could go home.
I walked past the Three Fates fountain, sure their accusing eyes followed me. On a park bench, I wrapped my heavy coat around myself, but I couldn’t settle.
If only I could turn the clock back. If I’d grabbed my case at the airport and not met the handsome stranger, not wheeled chewing gum over his designer shoes. If I’d put my sunglasses on before driving out of the petrol station, where would I be now?
A woman about my own age pulled up and sat next to me, her baby peacefully asleep in a pushchair. I stared at it, trying to imagine . . .
‘I wish the little bugger would sleep like that through the night. I’m absolutely knackered!’ she said good-humouredly.
I don’t know why I put my hand on my belly, and then had to bite hard on my lip.
‘Ah, pregnant?’ she asked.
I nodded and shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
She sighed. ‘Gotcha. Difficult. Been there myself.’
‘What? You mean . . . ?’
I wanted to search her face for answers, but she had already turned her attention back to the bundle in the pushchair. ‘Had two terminations. Young, foolish, looking for love. Wasn’t even sure who the father was. Had to go to England in those days – mad, really – but I never regretted it.’ The baby stretched, fisted its eyes, and sucked on an imaginary teat. The woman smiled. ‘Time to get him home – shovel food in one end and clean up the other. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep for six months. I’m a mess, my house is a mess, but I wouldn’t swap the little sod for anything.’ She pulled the baby’s blanket a little higher and stood. ‘Good luck to you!’ she called over her shoulder before walking away.